We're No. 1!
As has become the case for the better part of the last decade, the Salt Lake television market leads the nation in Olympics viewing. The numbers vary a bit from night to night, but a higher percentage of local viewers are tuning in to NBC's prime-time coverage of the Games than viewers in any other market in the country.
(And, by locally, we mean all of Utah and parts of Idaho, Wyoming and Nevada, which are included in the Salt Lake market by the folks at Nielsen who do the ratings research.)
How popular are the Olympics locally? Again the numbers vary a bit from day to day, but Utah ratings are about twice the national average.
UNFORTUNATELY FOR NBC, however, the Olympics aren't the biggest game in TV town anymore.
That honor goes to, gulp, "American Idol."
The cheesy Fox talent show crushed the Games in the ratings on Tuesday night, attracting 27 million viewers to just 16.1 million for NBC's coverage from Torino. If that were a basketball game, it would have been "Idol" 100, Olympics 59.
Yikes.
WHO WOULD'VE THOUGHT that NBC would learn this lesson while it was in Utah four years ago?
"I would say that we learned a lot from our Salt Lake experience," said coordinating producer Molly Solomon. "First of all, there was the curious grassroots appeal of curling across this country that was unanticipated."
"Unanticipated" is quite the understatement.
ABC AND ESPN2 HAVE released their Major League Soccer schedule, and Real Salt Lake is on it twice.
The home team has two home games on ESPN2 — Saturday, April 29, vs. the L.A. Galaxy and Saturday, May 27, vs. Colorado. That's the second-fewest number of appearances any of the 12 teams in the MLS will make, with only Kansas City (with one) making fewer.
ABC is airing only one regular-season game — the April 1 season-opener between Chicago and Dallas — as well as the MLS All-Star Game on July 29 and the MLS Cup on Nov. 12. ESPN2 is airing 23 regular-season games and, with one matchup left to be determined, here's how many times each of the teams will appear:
Chicago Fire — 7; Los Angeles Galaxy — 6; D. C. United — 6; Chivas USA — 5; New England Revolution — 4; FC Dallas — 4; Houston 1836 — 4; Columbus Crew — 3; Real Salt Lake — 2; Metrostars — 2; Colorado Rapids — 2; Kansas City Wizards — 1.
Obviously, the choices were made on the basis of how good the teams were last year — Chivas was the only team in the league with a worse record than RSL. And, oddly enough, TV market size wasn't a huge consideration, either, because the Metrostars — who are in the No. 1 TV market — are on the same number of times as Colorado (No. 18) and Salt Lake (No. 36).
For local fans, this doesn't mean a whole lot. RSL has yet to release its local broadcast schedule, and there will be game on Fox Sports Utah and the Fox Soccer Channel as well.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com